negotiation, and co-design. On
the last day of our immersion
tour, we visited with key staff
from the Institute of Design to
see firsthand the greenhouse of
the methods we would be using
to reimagine what a mobile and
connected lifestyle in the 21st
century could be like. Moving
forward, the design group at TI
would be working under a new
set of assumptions with a framework that would transform the
business, and for many of us,
our careers.
Development and Demonstration
The User Understanding Lab
at TI was established soon
after the return from our trip
to Chicago. Its mission was to
change the way the corporation saw and used industrial
design; its case study was a
program called Livegear. TI’s
calculator and notebook computer businesses were reaching
maximum growth, so the company, with the backing of CEO
Jerry Junkins (who tragically
died during the course of the
project) set about a transformation. We began by recognizing
a trend toward increasingly
networked and information-based mobile work and saw that
our current product offerings
were in no way optimized to
support the behaviors of these
users. So what exactly were
people doing, and where? And
how would we go about creating new, more relevant product categories and products
for this emerging market?
Enter John Rheinfrank.
He began by facilitating a
research effort that would place
us directly in the lives of stu-
dents, lawyers, construction
managers, and physicians. We
would “shadow” them for days,
noting when, why, and how they
changed contexts and what
they used to make the transi-
tion work for them. It was the
first time I had ever really paid
attention to the variety of places
that a college student studied,
distinguished the “grunt work”
from the “core work” in a typical
office environment, and docu-
mented what really happens
between people in a meeting. I
painstakingly described every-
thing I saw and then took pic-
tures and video of it to further
deconstruct back in the User
Understanding Lab.
Evaluation
In the User Experience Lab, TI’s
original equipment manufacturers, partners, and other business
units could see a process and a
product: an empathic approach
to understanding people instead
of “markets” and a translation
of human factors into tools
that they could hold, work, and
share. It provided the conditions
and moments that John had
felt were necessary to assess
the relevance, impact, interest,
usefulness, and to some degree
the usability of our prototypes.
Our work started conversations
November + December 2010
